 | | | Subject: Doctor Who, Star Trek - Finding the Perfect Universe?
Posted Apr 29, 2012 by  Dmitri Gheorgheni
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1
 | | This past week, Elektra and I have embarked on an orgy of watching the new 'Doctor Who'. So far, we're up to 2006. We might catch up on all the doings of the Daleks, Cybermen, and whatnot, one of these days, if the Netflix videos hold out.
We're enjoying them. We were always fans of the old 'Doctor Who', way back in the 1980s, and the new ones are fun. Clever, witty, and the scenery no longer falls apart at a touch. The music's too loud, causing problems with my hearing-aid balance, but otherwise, it's a great show. Gives us lots to talk about and analyse.
By the way, we thought Christopher Eccleston was just superb. And some of the moments in the series are genuinely moving.
Why do I bring this up? After all, it's very old news, discussing six-year-old TV episodes.
Well, we got to thinking about the kinds of universes people enjoy creating in science fiction. And I ran across this excellent, from-the-heart blog entry by somebody. Please take a few minutes to read it, you'll laugh and then get thoughtful. There are a couple of comments. Read them, too.
http://veronabotsford.blogspot.com/...ral-analysis-of-doctor-who-and.html
Now, I think this is an interesting take on things. First, because I've always found the Doctor a much more interesting character than Captain Picard. (Note to those bloggers: both are played by British actors. I don't know if that means anything.) I like the Doctor better, because I live in hope that somewhere, there is a world that tolerates eccentricity better than this one. I'm eccentric, you see.
I'm fully in agreement with this blogger when she says that living aboard the Enterprise is a whole lot like being stuck in an office building. Not much fun. I remember the episode where Sonya, a new engineering officer, first met Captain Picard. She spilled hot chocolate on him. Typical office moment: you meet the boss, and something socially awkward happens.
What the blogger and her correspondents are saying, though, is even more interesting: they're saying some people (probably not only in the US) *like it this way*. Before we say, 'what the...?', I'd like to relate a memory.
Back in the 1960s, when 'Classic' Star Trek was originally shown, I enjoyed it, simply because we weren't spoiled for choice when it came to primetime scifi. However, I watched it dismissively. The constant bleating about how superior humans were annoyed the life out of me. When the series was over, I did not mourn it.
But others did. A few years later, when I started graduate school, I met one of the early 'Trekkies'. This young woman was so painfully shy that she gave up her language studies rather than be confronted by the horror of teaching classes with six students in them. But on the weekends, she and her friends got together and dressed in homemade Star Trek uniforms, recreating the ambience of the Enterprise.
This was 1975. There was no Star Trek franchise. There weren't even any videotapes. Just some episodes in syndication on late-night TV. Nobody was marketing this. They just spontaneously decided to re-enact a TV show in which everybody had a boring office job on a spaceship. I didn't get it then, and I don't get it now.
So popular did this pastime become that years later, the studios revived the series. And made another, and another. And films. I believe the term they use for this, and all the spin-off marketing, is 'cash cow'.
Wow.
So maybe there's something to the idea that somewhere, a lot of somebodies have a peculiar idea of bliss: walking around in a flying office building, filling out reports?
PS The interior decoration aboard the Enterprise has always reminded me of a mid-price motel chain. They get their bric-a-brac from Pier 1 Imports, too - I know this. Once, we were watching an episode, and Worf had the exact same cobalt blue candle holders as those on our coffee table. 
PPS If you think 'Star Trek' is bad, realise this: they've begung re-enatcing MAD MEN:
http://www.epicurious.com/articlesg...g/partiesevents/tvdinnersmadmenmenu
Help.
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| | | Subject: Doctor Who, Star Trek - Finding the Perfect Universe?
Posted Apr 29, 2012 by Vip
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 | | Ah, but they'd probably never role play that day on star date 13578432:blah blah5785424642.2 when absolutely nothing of note happened. It's also unlikely they took the roles of shuttle bay clean up crew or the barman.  the universe might be a flying office, but they don't have to be the secretary.
I'm rewatching all of Next Generation at the moment, actually. I would definitely say thatnDoctor Who has a much better hit rate of good episodes per series, but that could be because they don't have to churn out 26 episodes a season.
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| | | Subject: Doctor Who, Star Trek - Finding the Perfect Universe?
Posted Apr 29, 2012 by Dmitri Gheorgheni
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6
| | Good point, Vip. So far, this 'Doctor Who' series has good stuff going on. Much better than, say, Wesley Crusher defeating the aliens with the addictive computer game.
That's not to knock the social effect of 'Star Trek'. At least two famous women - Whoopi Goldberg, actor, and Mae C Jemison, a US astronaut - have said they were inspired by Nichelle Nichols' performance as Lt Uhura. (And hey, Uhura *was* a secretary.)
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Mae_Jemison
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| | | Subject: Doctor Who, Star Trek - Finding the Perfect Universe?
Posted Apr 29, 2012 by Vip
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| | You could also potentially argue that TV sci-fi, as a genre, has grown up, or at least changed. I like Star Trek, but I would say that the Farscape universe, and Babylon 5, took a good idea and mproved upon it. Now it seems that soap operas in space are the current flavour of the month, which sn't my thing, but who knows what will come next?
A bit like Uhura; while now we might look back and laugh at her tiny skirt, it was an important move forward at the time.
I can't think of Wesley Crusher without thinking of Wil Wheaton, and in turn that makes me thin of Sheldon from Big Bang Theory. Which is a good thing!
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| | | Subject: Doctor Who, Star Trek - Finding the Perfect Universe?
Posted Apr 30, 2012 by ITIWBS
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| | What I miss most from the Tom Baker era at Doctor Who (I used to watch it regularly back in the late 1970s on PBS - KCET, Los Angeles.) is a formula plot item, one paradox per episode, a plot device with a special relevance in a story about time travel.
The moment would come when the alien antagonists of the week would spring the paradox on Doctor Who, and rather than putting his foot in it and telling them, so to speak, to play the black jack on the red queen, instead he'd give them the 'old hairy eyeball' and blow the joint.
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| | | Subject: Doctor Who, Star Trek - Finding the Perfect Universe?
Posted May 1, 2012 by ITIWBS
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| |  One of my favorite episodes of "Hercules, the Legendary Journeys" was the one in which they introduce Aphrodite, after all after you count all the generations, the great-grandmother of Zeus, Poseidon and Hades, appearing first in a surfing scene modeled on Botticelli's "Birth of Venus", with a climactic appearance as an old crone in the scene in which the golden apple of youth was rolled across the floor.
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